The Data Stack Show - The PRQL: The Metrics-First Approach: Transforming How We Understand Data with Mark Driscoll of Rill Data

Episode Date: June 9, 2025

The Data Stack Show is a weekly podcast powered by RudderStack, customer data infrastructure that enables you to deliver real-time customer event data everywhere it’s needed to power smarter decisions and better customer experiences. Each week, we’ll talk to data engineers, analysts, and data scientists about their experience around building and maintaining data infrastructure, delivering data and data products, and driving better outcomes across their businesses with data.RudderStack helps businesses make the most out of their customer data while ensuring data privacy and security. To learn more about RudderStack visit rudderstack.com.

Welcome to the Data Stack show prequel. This is a short bonus episode where we preview the upcoming show. You'll get to meet our guests and hear about the topics we're going to cover. If they're interesting to you, you can catch the full-length show when it drops on Wednesday. Welcome back to the show everyone. Mike, thank you for coming back on. We have Mike Driscoll here.

He's a co-founder of Real Data, and we have some amazing topics to cover today. But Mike, for those who did not hear the first episode with you, give us a brief background. Yeah, thanks, Eric. Thanks, Brooks and John for having me. We talked when we first met about, I think, the Real as an emerging BI tool and some of the unique lens we had on admittedly a crowded market. And we were excited to show off a real developer that had just been launched in real cloud. So it's been a couple of years. We're now doing a lot more in, of course, the world of AI.

And I'm just thrilled to share with the audience at the Data Stocks show what we've been cranking on. Yeah. So Mike, one of the topics that we talked about before the show that I'm excited to dig in on is kind of the philosophy behind the BI tool. When you're in a crowded market, one of the things you can do is have a really strong philosophy about how you approach problems and I've really seen that with RIL. So we're going to dig into that, but what are some topics you wanna hit? Well, you know, I'd be remiss if I didn't say that.

I think the most exciting thing we're seeing in the world right now is, of course, AI, and I think naturally there's some connections between AI and BI, and particularly with, you know, our embrace of BI as code, we think that there's some really cool intersections between those two. Love it.

Well, let's do it again. Awesome, let's do it. All right, that's a wrap for the prequel. The full-length episode will drop Wednesday morning. Subscribe now so you don't miss it.